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The largest mistake I see in lead conversion is the lack of phone call follow up to Internet leads. Most of the Agents and Brokers I train have very little understanding of what to do with an Internet lead. The most common response I see is an email saying, “Thank you for using my site, if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.” That’s pretty much their entire lead conversion program. Most Agents are afraid to pick up the phone and are losing out on thousands and thousands of dollars in commissions. It’s not rocket science!

I’ve never really understood the fear in making calls. What is the worst case scenario that can happen? Someone might tell you they are not interested. Someone else might hang up the phone on you. Does it really matter? For those who follow my lead conversion systems, each call is a warm call. After all, they registered on your site and gave you a good phone number. That’s usually a good indication that they would like a call. Still, most agents will not call their leads. The problem is, if you are not calling, then another Agent most likely is calling. Look at it this way. If you just send listings and never talk to the customer, how do you expect to build a relationship. Most Agents think of a lead buying months from now as very far away and having no value. True lead conversion people like myself look at a lead buying in a year and realize this will give us a great 12 month opportunity to build a relationship. That must be the mindset in building your Internet program and phone call follow up program.

We ended up 2010 with 329 sales and a lead conversion rate of a little over 4.25%. Not bad. I’m excited about this year because I think we will start seeing a rise shortly in business. There seems to be a little bit of confidence out there. I sure hope I’m right.

Every January we get a good amount of new members who want to make changes in their careers. Welcome to all of you who are new! One of the things I think is a MUST, is understanding your numbers. It’s almost impossible grow your business without understanding the numbers.

So what do you need to know? Well in my case, I always want to know my gross number of leads per year. Then of course I look at our total sales. Once I know my sales per leads numbers, I can make adjustments from there.

I’ve been online tonight reading a lot of different views on Internet Leads. I keep hearing and reading the same complaint. “Internet leads are no good because I don’t want to chase the business.” “They are never serious buyers.” “I would rather work on referrals and networking”.

It’s interesting because in some ways, not much as changed since I got into Real Estate back in 2001. I was told then by everyone, don’t waste your money or time on Internet Leads. As I look back, all of those real estate agents who told me that either never had more than a half dozen sales per year, or are no longer in business today.

So let’s talk for a minute about what they call “chasing the Internet Lead”.

Firstly, chasing and prospecting can be interchanged. If you are going to make money in this business, you need to understand that prospecting is a major part of this business, at least for those who are successful. I recently attended a seminar in Las Vegas that had 4,200 Agents attending. I had talked to probably 50 Agents that sell between 50 and 150 homes per year. They all had one thing in common: they all prospect daily. Therefore, they are successful because of the amount of prospecting they do on a daily basis.

Several months ago I wrote a follow up blog post on our LCA program and I’m glad to say it has worked out great. Our sales are 20% of last year with the same amount of leads generated. In a market where we are still hurting, especially since the tax credit stopped, we are continuing to sell above the rest of the competition. It’s tough to quantify our numbers at this point and most likely will have difficulty until the end of the year.

With that said, we have learned some great lessons in numbers from our LCA program.

Here they are:

We know that 10% of our calls turn into scheduled appointments

We know that 50% of our scheduled appointments cancel for some reason or another

We know that 33% of our appointments that show up ultimately purchase a home

So because of that we know that if we want to sell 48 homes in a year per Agent, each Agent needs to call 240 people per month to schedule 24 appointments to show 12 different customers to receive 4 sales.

It’s been almost 6 months since we started our Lead Conversion Administrator (LCA) program. So much has happened and I continue on the quest to increase our lead conversion. I won’t do lead conversion stats for another few weeks, but I thought our results so far are very notable. So far this year we have closed about 175 properties with 15 more set to close this month. On top of that we have around 20 or so short sales contracts waiting to close too. We know that doesn’t mean anything though. Right now we are 19.1% ahead of last year which keeps in line with my goal of 20% growth per year.

With all this said, it’s still interesting with the struggle we have with keeping Agents in work mode. Yes, the market has been tough.

However, as I try to explain to my Agents, it’s only tough if you are trying to sell listings. Since 90% of our sales come from buyers, my Agents need not worry about how bad the market is, but how they can help their customers. We are blessed to have over 38,000 leads in our system and a software product, our 100MPH Marketing software, that allows us to seek out only the most active leads with potential to buy. I have been analyzing my numbers on a regular basis. I know, no surprise to those who know me. It still comes down to having the right agents. I have 21 Agents right now. Of those Agents, 12 never sold a home prior to coming to my office and are all on track to have at least 20 sales this year.

It’s been an interesting first 5 months in Brevard County Florida. Arguably we have one of the worst Real Estate markets in the country. Our prices came down from $275k average at our peak in 2005 to $117k average currently. The good news is that we seemed to have leveled for about a year and days on the market are averaging 90-120 days for most homes with 30-60 days for homes priced correctly.

Many consumers have been burned by a short sale or two and have decided to stay away from them. We like that! We also been able to increase our home sales price to $144k this year by better understanding our buyers and our leads.

Like I said, it’s been an interesting first 5 months. We are on track to beat our numbers from last year by at least 20% maybe more. We are closing 30-46 homes per month which is up from our average last year of 28 closings. It’s very exciting.

So what can I attribute our continued growth each year? Two things, Buyerlink and lead conversion.

BuyerLink is a no-brainer since I capture twice as many leads at half the cost of what I was paying with Google and Yahoo!. Once you do capture the lead, you have to be able to do something with it. The key to lead conversion is systems. Because BuyerLink produces so many leads, you need to be sure to have a solid conversion system including listings, drip campaigns and most importantly phone call follow up.

If you don’t have a system in place, not only do you not get the return you are looking to get, you can waste a ton of money!

I could spend hours going over most of this stuff, but the reality is, converting leads is just not that hard. Half of it is attitude. Continue reading this post

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